How Baby Black Holes Build Giants express
The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted ancient galaxies harboring supermassive black holes — far too massive for their young age after the Big Bang. There wasn't enough time for normal growth, so they must have formed differently.
Perhaps primordial black holes — hypothetical crumbs dreamed up by Stephen Hawking — served as the building material. These 'bricks', mixed with dark matter, quickly assemble into cosmic heavyweights. In clusters, they merge like raindrops on a windshield — the same law governs an avalanche of mergers. Heavier objects sink to the center, collide more often, and grow explosively.
An unexpected twist: each such crumb, the size of an atom, weighs as much as a mountain, and their collective behavior follows the equation of raindrops. Simulations confirm that mere moments after the Big Bang, a swarm of these babies could give birth to a giant black hole that we see today as a red dot.
Primordial black holes have never been directly detected, but they could make up a significant chunk of dark matter — the invisible stuff that keeps galaxies from flying apart.